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WordPress Stats: Your Ultimate List of WordPress Statistics (Data, Studies, Facts – Even the Little-Known)

Okay, so you’re writing a post/article or creating some other piece of content around WordPress, but you want what you’re saying to pack a stronger punch … to resonate with the reader better.

For that, you’re going to need some hard, objective WordPress stats.

Raw data is just very tough to ignore and makes everyone pay attention.

The reason is quite simple; everyone has their opinions on things, and you can’t tell whether they’re true or false at first sight, but raw data can’t be argued with. Everyone can relate to it, and everyone can interpret it in their own way.

So this is why we’ve created this resource.

Here are the most interesting pieces of data and statistics from around the world of WordPress. Use them whenever you’re working on a new article, blog post, infographic, or whatever else you have in store.

Oh, and don’t forget to share and link. Much appreciated!

The Ultimate List of WordPress Statistics

WordPress usage and popularity

WordPress runs 43.2% of the entire internet. [2][5]

The growth of WordPress’ market share is quite impressive 🔥. Here’s how these stats played out over the last five years:

WordPress dominance over the years
2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017
42.9% 39% 35% 32% 28% 27%
  • 64.3% is WordPress’ share of the global CMS market – making it the most popular CMS of them all for the 7th year in a row. [60][2][15]
  • New York Observer, New York Post, TED, Thought Catalog, Williams, USA Today, CNN, Fortune.com, TIME.com, National Post, Spotify, TechCrunch, CBS Local, NBC, and more all use WordPress. [32]
  • WordPress is the fastest growing CMS, with roughly 500+ new sites being built daily in the top 10 million websites on the web (compared to Shopify’s and Squarespace’s 60-80). [37]
  • WordPress powers 14.7% of top 100 websites in the world. [41]
  • 27 posts are published every second on WordPress sites around the world. [4]
  • 37 million global Google searches for “WordPress” are made per month. [4]
  • WordPress has been translated to 205 languages. [58]

The keyword “WordPress” gets googled around 2.7 million times every month. [42]

  • 8% of the top 100 blogs according to Technorati are managed with WordPress. [7]
  • 3,639 of the top 10k websites on the web use WordPress. [15]
  • 36,160 of the top 100k websites use WordPress. [15]
  • 355,218 of the top 1M websites use WordPress. [15]

In 2014, non-English WordPress downloads surpassed English downloads for the first time. [8]

22% of new domains in the US are run with WordPress. [6]

WordPress as a CMS (47%) is nearly 12 times more popular than Drupal (4%) in India.

In the US (2014 data), WordPress is preferred by 50% of the users, with Drupal scooping up 17% and Joomla getting 6.44%. [6]

🚀 1 –
the number of times WordPress was caught guiding missiles. [33]

WordPress development

jazz.

There have been 43 major versions of WordPress released since the platform’s inception. [24]

  • Major versions of WordPress get released every 150 days on the average. [12]
  • WordPress gets the most of its downloads on Wednesdays, while Fridays are the least popular. [39]
  • 35.5% of websites with a recognizable content management system use the latest version of WordPress (version 6). [61]
  • WordPress 6.0 has been downloaded more than 95 million times already. [23]
  • WordPress 6.x is used on more than 55% of all WordPress websites, while WordPress 5.x is used by less than 38%. [5]
  • 57 – the number of official translations of WordPress. [27]
  • WordPress 4.1 features 394,243 lines of code (96,924 of those lines are comments.). In comparison with the previous major release, 17,599 lines were added. [12]
  • WordPress 5.9 features 771,345 lines of code (293,182 of those lines are comments.) [26]
  • Around 38% of the whole WordPress code are comments. [26]
  • WordPress 5.9 was developed by a combined effort of 624 contributors. [30]

The milestones:

  • Version 1.2 – plugins are introduced. [34]
  • Version 1.2 – localization is introduced. [34]
  • Version 1.5 – themes as we know them now are introduced. [35]

WordPress themes 🎨

A premium WordPress theme has the average price of $57.54/$59. [10]

There are more than 5,000 themes in the official theme directory at WordPress.org. [29] Among the 10 most popular free themes on WordPress.org, 5 come from third-party developers (not developed by WordPress.org or Automattic). They are: Hello, Astra, OceanWP, Neve, and Kadence. [29]

Divi, Avada, and Hello Elementor are the three most popular WordPress themes when it comes to the number of installations. Together, they have 17% market share. [44] There’s a new sale recorded every 5 seconds in the Envato marketplaces (CodeCanyon and ThemeForest). [62]

The new block pattern directory at WordPress.org has received a warm welcome from the community. There have been 846 block patterns added to the repository already, and counting. [59]

patterns.

ThemeForest:

  • There are more than 11,000 WordPress themes on ThemeForest. [43]
  • The top three best selling themes on ThemeForest? That would be Avada, The7 and Flatsome. [43]
  • 50% of all WordPress themes on ThemeForest have made at least $1,000 in a month, and 5% have made at least 10,000 in a month. [14]
  • 25% of all WordPress themes on ThemeForest have made at least $2,500 in a month. [14]
  • 15% of all WordPress themes on ThemeForest have made at least $5,000 in a month. [14]
  • 7% of all WordPress themes on ThemeForest have made at least $7,500 in a month. [14]
  • 93% of overall ThemeForest sales come from responsive themes. [14]
  • Over 70% of ThemeForest searches are focused around niche themes. [14]

WordPress plugins 🔌

WordPress.org plugins received 1 billion total downloads, and counting. [22]

59,000+ WordPress plugins are in the official directory, with new ones being added daily. [22]

1,250,000,000+ total plugin downloads happened on WordPress.org so far. [45]

The most popular WordPress plugins in the official directory and their current total download numbers are [2]:

  • Yoast SEO – 470,000,000+
  • Jetpack – 267,000,000+
  • Akismet – 262,000,000+
  • Wordfence Security – 233,000,000+
  • Contact Form 7 – 216,000,000+
  • WooCommerce – 182,000,000+
  • Elementor – 169,000,000+
  • WooCommerce powers 8.7% of all websites. [46]
  • WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress plugin on live websites. Currently in use on 20.2% of all WordPress sites. Elementor is the runner up. Currently in use on 18.3% of all WordPress sites. [5]
  • There are 980 plugins for WooCommerce on WordPress.org alone. [63]
  • During its lifespan, Akismet has blocked more than 530 billion spam comments – and counting! [64]
  • Yoast SEO is being downloaded nearly 1 million times every week. [65]
  • On CodeCanyon, 80% of searches are focused on functionality (i.e. sliders, forms, calendars). [14]
  • There are 5,000+ premium WordPress plugins on CodeCanyon. Slider Revolution, WP Bakery Page Builder and Kreatura Slider are the best sellers. [47]
  • 7 plugins have reached more than 200 million downloads: Yoast SEO, Jetpack, Wordfence, Akismet, Contact Form 7, Elementor, WooCommerce. [29]

What about page builder plugins? Who’s the leader? [68]

  • Elementor: ~40-43% market share (among websites using a page builder)
  • WPBakery Page Builder: ~33% market share
  • Divi Builder: ~15% market share
  • SiteOrigin Page Builder: 3% market share

WordPress security 🔒

According to research by Sucuri, 60.04% of websites analyzed contained at least one backdoor, 52.6% of websites contained some form of SEO spam; 95.62% of those websites run on WordPress. [48]

8% of WordPress websites get hacked because of a weak password. [52]

  • 52% of infected WordPress sites are out of date. [48]
  • The top three plugins that hackers love breaking into are TimThumb, Revslider, and Gravity Forms. [48]
  • According to one study, 30.95% of Alexa’s top 1 million websites run a vulnerable version 3.6 of WordPress. [49]
  • In 2017, 4000 WordPress websites got infected with malware coming from a fake SEO plugin. [51]
  • Wordfence reports up to 90,000 attacks on WordPress sites every minute. [53]
  • 17.8% of the vulnerabilities reported by WPScan are caused by WordPress plugins. [50]
  • 39% of WordPress vulnerabilities are cross-site scripting (XSS) issues. [54]
  • 80.2% of WordPress vulnerabilities result from the WordPress core files. [54]
  • 2% of WordPress vulnerabilities are caused by WordPress themes. [54]

WordPress.com

WordPress.com gets more unique visitors than Amazon (126 million per month vs. 96 million per month). [7]

  • WordPress.com reaches 181 million monthly unique views – the 4th most viewed platform in the US after Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. [18]
  • 50,000 WordPress.com websites are being launched daily. [3]
  • Over 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages each month. [20]
  • 70 million new posts and 77 million new comments are added monthly. [20]
  • Over 12 million new pages and 35 million file uploads are added each month. [20]
  • 24.7 million files are uploaded to WordPress.com blogs monthly. [3]
  • Around 27,000 support requests get added monthly. [20]

Over 120 languages are in use on WordPress.com sites. [20]

71% of WordPress.com blogs are written in English. [20]

4.7% of WordPress.com blogs are written in Spanish. [20]

There are around 2 million theme switches each month on WordPress.com. [20] Every second, 27 new posts get published on WordPress.com blogs. [20]

Flickr, YouTube, and Photobucket are the most embedded services on WordPress.com. [20]

💡 Did you know that there are two kinds of the WordPress software/platform? There’s WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and they are NOT at all the same. We explain the differences in a separate post. Check it out in the related articles list at the top of the page..

WordPress freelancing/jobs 💰

$61-80 per hour is how much WordPress developers usually charge. [7]

  • The average salary for WordPress jobs is $70,059. [40]
  • State of the Word address says: 25% of survey participants make their living from WordPress. Over 90% of people build more than one site, and spend less than 200 hours on each. [1]
  • $1,000 is what a person usually pays for a full site design. [10]
  • However, custom-built WordPress websites can cost anywhere between $1,000 and $100,000. [38]
  • In 2014, WordPress was the most requested skill in the world according to Sketch Themes. [6]
  • 243,161 WordPress projects have been completed on Freelancer.com as of January 2015. That’s a total value of $60,571,205. [6]
  • The most successful Envato Power Elite author has sold over 100,000 copies of one theme alone. [14]
  • Facebook has the same number of monthly unique visitors (US) as WordPress.com, but they employ 25 times more people. [18]

The average salary of a WordPress developer is $107,000. [66] Here’s how these averages play out based on different development fields:

  • Backend WordPress developers: $116,000 average salary. [66]
  • Frontend WordPress developers: $100,700. [66]
  • Full stack WordPress developers: $104,195. [66]

WordPress community 🤼

The total number of WordCamps to ever take place is growing rapidly – currently at more than 1091 organized in total all over the globe, held in 373 cities, 65 countries, on 6 continents (as of Feb 27th, 2020). [55]

  • 142 official WordCamps were held in 2019! [67]
  • There are 764+ meetup groups for WordPress all over the world. [16]
  • 495,331+ active members in WordPress meetup groups all over the world. [16]
  • 112 countries and 535 cities is where you can find WordPress meetup groups. [16]
  • There are 1,200+ active topics on the official WordPress support forum [31]

The first WordCamp ever was held in San Francisco, CA on August 5th, 2006. What started with just 500 brave attendees and took just one day has now grown into a global phenomenon! [57]

WordCamps in the years 2011-2015:

  • Around 11,914 speakers in total. [56]
  • Around 15,785 total sessions. [56]
  • 175 WordCamps held in the US vs 184 WordCamps outside the US. [56]
  • 5,937 unique sponsors. [56]
  • 199,628 tickets sold in total. [56]

WordCamps in 2019:

  • WordCamps were held in 49 different countries. [56]
  • The most tickets were sold for WordCamp Europe (3,868) and WordCamp US (1,750). [56]
  • The average number of attendees per WordCamp was about 327. [56]

And there you have it. Whether you plan on using these WordPress stats to write a compelling blog post, or simply as a conversation starter with other like-minded WordPress aficionados, we sincerely appreciate that you took the time to read through them. If you have any interesting WordPress stats of your own that we missed here, then please drop ’em in the comments below. We always love to learn more about WordPress, so don’t be shy.

Thanks, HubSpot and Neil Patel for inspiring us to create this resource.

Don’t forget to join our crash course on speeding up your WordPress site. Learn more:

References:

[1] http://ma.tt/2014/10/sotw-2014/
[2] https://trends.builtwith.com/cms
[3] http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/wordpress-statistics/
[4] https://torquemag.io/2016/10/13-surprising-wordpress-statistics-updated-2016/
[5] http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all
[6] https://www.hostt.com/wordpress-stats-for-2015/
[7] https://www.codementor.io/freelance-rates/wordpress-developers
[8] http://www.wpblogington.com/data/wordpress-2015.php
[10] https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/wordpress-theme-cost-analysis/
[12] https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/mesmerizing-wordpress-stats/
[14] http://inside.envato.com/pressnomics/
[15] http://trends.builtwith.com/cms
[16] https://www.meetup.com/pro/wordpress/
[17] http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/wordpress-statistics/2/
[18] https://automattic.com/about/
[19] http://www.woothemes.com/2015/04/woocommerce-7-million-downloads/
[20] https://wordpress.com/activity/
[21] https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2015/01/06/2014-in-review/
[22] https://wordpress.org/plugins/
[23] https://wordpress.org/download/counter/
[24] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
[25] https://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/advanced/
[26] own research
[27] https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/
[28] https://wordpress.org/plugins/browse/popular/
[29] https://wordpress.org/themes/browse/popular/
[30] https://wordpress.org/news/2022/01/josephine/
[31] https://wordpress.org/support/view/all-topics/
[32] https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/
[33] https://dd32.id.au/2010/06/12/wordpress-what-cant-it-do/
[34] http://codex.wordpress.org/Changelog/1.2
[35] http://codex.wordpress.org/Changelog/1.5
[36] https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/advanced/
[37] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y

[38] https://poststatus.com/wordpress-website-cost/
[39] https://wpcentral.io/
[40] http://www.simplyhired.com/salaries-k-wordpress-jobs.html
[41] https://www.whoishostingthis.com/compare/wordpress/stats/
[42] https://app.kwfinder.com/
[43] https://themeforest.net/
[44] https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/wordpress-theme
[45] https://managewp.com/blog/statistics-about-wordpress-usage
[46] https://woocommerce.com/
[47] https://codecanyon.net/category/wordpress?sort=sales
[48] https://sucuri.net/reports/2021-hacked-website-report/
[49] https://www.wpwhitesecurity.com/wordpress-security-news-updates/statistics-70-percent-wordpress-installations-vulnerable/
[50] https://wpscan.org/
[51] https://www.scmagazine.com/4000-wordpress-sites-infected-through-fake-plugin/article/648431/
[52] https://wpsmackdown.com/wordpress-hack-statistics-2013/
[53] https://www.wordfence.com/
[54] https://www.wpwhitesecurity.com/statistics-highlight-main-source-wordpress-vulnerabilities/
[55] https://central.wordcamp.org/about/
[56] https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/08/22/wordcamps-in-2019/
[57] https://themeisle.com/blog/wceu-2016-preview/
[58] https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/
[59] https://wordpress.org/patterns/
[60] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/ms/y
[61] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/6
[62] https://www.envato.com/
[63] https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/woocommerce/
[64] https://akismet.com/
[65] https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/advanced/
[66] https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/web-developer-salary/
[67] https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/08/22/wordcamps-in-2019/
[68] https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/

Karol K

11 Comments
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V8web
May 15, 2018 4:01 am

Good article!

Sabina Ionescu
March 5, 2018 4:36 pm

Hey, Automattic has several projects besides WP.com. Anyways, I think that’s a reliable source 🙂

Mr AlMeRvOx
March 3, 2018 10:37 pm

hello , how i can get all wordpress sites list ? i need to download it

Sabina Ionescu
March 5, 2018 4:45 pm
Reply to  Mr AlMeRvOx

Not sure if there is such a thing out there. Anyways, what do you plan to do with it when you find it? 🙂

Dibakar Ghosh
June 14, 2018 8:28 pm
Reply to  Mr AlMeRvOx

you a noob hacker of some sort?

Cuyler Callahan
January 8, 2018 5:00 am

This is a great article. I’m using some of the stats for one of my own articles, and I’ll be linking to this article for others to view for themselves.

Darkglass Web Design
September 16, 2017 12:53 am

Great information.
thank you for that.

Sean
July 31, 2017 5:28 pm

Thanks for putting together this great resource! I’m still sifting through the footnotes!

copywriter1
May 24, 2017 6:07 pm

I hope you don’t mind me using this data in some of my advertising copy. Good article!

Adelina Tuca
May 30, 2017 3:13 pm
Reply to  copywriter1

Hey, no problem, you can use it. Good luck! 🙂

Dibakar Ghosh
June 14, 2018 8:27 pm

Dude.. you referred to this very article in one your sources… What’s up with that?????? source point 30 is your own article… is that some sort of an Easter egg??? if so, then give me my reward!!!!

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